Culture Geek brings together leading organizations from around the world to share how they are adapting to the changing digital landscape.

In 2015, the MIT Media Lab began the largest website project in its 30+ year history. This required creating a basic digital asset management system (DAM). They needed a central repository for images and other collateral; they had closets and filing cabinets full of video cassettes and slides of decades of incredible Lab research, and wanted somewhere to put this content that was simple–and enjoyable–to use. As they explored features for a basic system, they unearthed many strategic reasons to create a more feature-rich and robust DAM system. They needed to give the Media Lab’s 25+ research groups, and hundreds of researchers and administrative staff, the ability to concurrently organize all this legacy media, and also wanted to create a foundation for additional media curation and presentation goals.

Their research into available solutions, both open-source and enterprise, didn’t produce options that they felt would work for them, so they decided to build a custom solution. As they’ve presented the completed first phase of the website project, including the first iteration of the DAM, there’s been a great deal of enthusiasm about the DAM’s open-source possibilities. The more they use the system, the more excited they are about its power and usefulness.

This presentation will discuss what MIT Media Lab learned while creating this DAM, and opportunities for other organizations and institutions to leverage what they’ve built.